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Samsung took the wraps off its new smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, today and to say the response has been muted would be an understatement. While the company managed to pack in an attractive 1.6-inch OLED screen into a wrist wearable device, the overall package is bulky, early hands-on testing found it slow, and even Samsung is saying you’ll need to charge it every day. But perhaps worse than all that, the Galaxy Gear seems to have an identity problem: It needs your phone nearby to do much of anything, but it also tries to replicate a great deal of the phone’s functionality through apps like Pinterest and Evernote running on the watch itself. This raises the question, what is the purpose of a smartwatch if it’s just a miniature clone of the phone? And given that, at Samsung’s price of $299, will anyone buy them?

Tradeoffs

For fans of fitness devices like the Fitbit or Jawbone Up, the Galaxy Gear offers similar functionality and will work with RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal right out of the box. That makes it an intriguing alternative, but already the tradeoffs become apparent. The fitness-only alternatives are tiny and durable, with batteries that require recharging infrequently. My Fitbit lasts me about a week, reports from friends with the Up indicate similar success. The Gear, of course, does more. It will show you your text messages without grabbing your phone from your pocket, let you skip songs on your music player and even take pictures. But whether your usage is light or heavy, it seems apparent that you’ll need to set in the charger nightly if you expect to make it through the next day.

That might not seem like a big deal. After all, no modern smartphone can go 2 days without an overnight charge (well, maybe Motorola’s Razr Maxx) so you’ll just charge the Gear at the same time, right? Sure, but then you’ve already lost one of the few clear advantages to the smartwatch: It can be with you when the phone is not quite. Say you left your phone in the charger, but a message or call comes in and you’re in the next room. You’re not sure if the call was important, so you need to go check it out. With the Gear, you get the message alert and then decide what you need to do. But if you had already put it in the charger, well, it’s also not with you.

Opportunities and challenges

These devices are not entirely new. The Pebble Smartwatch has gone from Kickstarter success story to Best BuyBest Buy and SonySony has been selling an Android companion that’s soon to be in its second generation. Both are focused on alerts: text messages, FacebookFacebook updates, appointment reminders. Pebble used the e-Ink display technology made famous by the early Amazon Kindles and gives the same kind of week-long battery life of the fitness trackers. The watch is kind of ugly but at $150, it’s also half the price of Samsung’s. Sony offers some limited water resistance that Samsung doesn’t but a much smaller feature set and battery life that’s likely to split the difference between the Pebble and the Gear. U.S. pricing for the new model is likely going to be around $249.

Samsung went all in. They added a microphone and speakers so you can use it to voice control the phone with S Voice (like AppleApple‘s Siri) and have sound come from the watch. Unfortunately, that voice control requires two presses on the watch’s one physical button. No magic like on the new Moto X phone where you just say, “OK Google Now” and the phone knows to pay attention. That’s probably impossible to offer with the watch’s small battery but it would make for true hands-free use.

The watch also has a small camera on the wristband so you can shoot 10-second video clips or take a nearly 2 megapixel still image. Great for those serendipitous moments where your phone is in your purse and there’s something to capture a picture of. Again, though, it won’t be as streamlined as the experience with Google Glass. The Gear is a Swiss Army-knife approach to the problem not unlike Samsung’s decision to build in much more elaborate apps to the watch itself. How well those apps work in reality is not yet clear, but keep in mind your nearby phone will be nearly offering a better view of your Pinterest board or your Evernote collection. And the slow processor of the Gear means that whatever interaction you can have on the watch will be less than ideal (early reviews call it “laggy”, even updated software is unlikely to improve the experience too much).

So far, the watch only works with Samsung devices running Android 4.3, which today is the newly announced Note 3 phablet and Note 10.1 tablet. Support for the popular Galaxy S4 is coming, although no date was provided. But it might not matter much. As currently delivered, the Gear is an intriguing concept: A smartphone companion that tries to offer a ton of functionality in an almost small enough package. The price is likely to keep many people away and the size seems female unfriendly at this point.

For Apple fans, the Gear offers some tantalizing clues about what the long-rumored iWatch might do. But if this is the best Apple can do, you’ll never see a watch from Cupertino. Battery life is allegedly a big concern there and if Apple can’t at least match what Sony is offering in a package that’s more attractive and svelte than Pebble, iPhone users can either pick up one of those Pebbles or keep waiting.

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